Audeamus
by Cenerea
Summary: There was once a legend - and probably there still is. People murmur: she was great; greater than any threat the Marines had experienced. She was a swordsman, not a human. And sailors whisper: did she meet the current greatest? Thus a story is created and immediately hushed: the risk is too high. No one, though, could ever picture just how far back this story goes. "Let us dare."
1. Prologue: Whisper

Audeamus

**Part I:**

**Rumors**

_"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: _  
><em>secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."<em>  
><em>- James Joyce<em>

_Prologue: Whisper_

A whisper is nothing more than air softly blown into words. Its breath gently caresses your ear as lips are tensed and pressed together into sound. Warmness kisses the thin cartilage, and you wish it would never stop. Words subtly wedge their way across the folds of your consciousness, until they nestle down somewhere they will not be disturbed. So do whispers implant ideas: a warm touch, a fleeting pleasure – an eroding longing to fill the new emptiness.

The moment those foreign lips leave your ear coldness hits it quietly but abruptly. A moment of disorientation is followed by one of wonder at the experience that has just ended. The words thus shift in their nest and nudge you to ask what more there is to say – but for the briefest instant you hesitate. You know how curiosity killed many more men than cats. But of no use is the cold air that is showered upon your skin by a light breeze: the call back to sanity is not heeded, and craving for the hot guilty pleasure to lull your senses once again into ephemeral bliss you draw your breath and whisper back— a plea.

So do whispers hold power. Like fleas, they anchor their invisible bodies to the human soul, drain the latter of its life force and slowly infest it with obsession – the obsession for _more_. It is a very lucid feeling, one that exploits your sanity over and beyond its natural limits. You want a story – one that has been forbidden; one that, having lost its right to be, took shelter in clandestine whispers, shifting shape from mouth to ear, from ear to mouth. What you obtain are disjointed fragments whose murmuring is not harmonized. Your pleasure lies in interpreting this cacophony of low voices and hot breaths, in selecting the most dissonant of all, and in setting these in a melody to which only you will have access. Your own private hymn of bliss— and you will know something more than all the others you have met so far. A willing succubus to your own dark passions, you drag your body anywhere a new whisper originates. And this is how this story begins.

An utterance that is spelt on paper does not hold the creative power of a whisper, but it entices those nestled words to fidget uncomfortably in their fold, triggering the now familiar mechanism of mania and desire. A letter found under your door is enough to prompt your feet towards the newly fixed destination: an anonymous bar in a poorly-lit backstreet. The air is damp; you bury your mouth and nose in the folds of your black scarf and you thrust your hands in the pockets of your dark coat as your steps softly splash and squish their way towards the entrance. You take a moment to gaze up to the dull insignia, feeling that insignificant but crucial moment of hesitation nudging at your good sense. But as your condensed breath puffs out of your mouth in small clouds and then disappears in the night, so does that moment dissipate into nothingness. The door is pushed open with a prolonged and low creak.

Bar music is playing too loudly in a room with poor acoustics. The light is a deep orange or golden shade that illuminates the moist surfaces of the long, worn wooden tables and effectively keeps hidden in darkness the corners of the room. It is in fact too dark to distinguish the color of the wallpaper – maybe a dark green? – but your final destination is too near to allow any sort of distraction. Thus you ignore the homely chatter of sailors, their drunken slurs and coarse laughter, the raised eyebrow of the curious bartender and his hand perpetually wiping a glass clean with a white cloth— thus you walk straight towards the dark table set apart in a corner of the stuffy room, close to a stained glass of indistinguishable color, keeping your eyes trained on the almost invisible figure of a small, pudgy man wrapped in a black coat silently staring down at his untouched glass of ale as he waits. This man is a man with a story: it is resting within his body, safe in its silent slumber, but just as quietly craving to be released in a low flow of hushed words. You had been waiting your entire life for this.

Soundlessly you approach him, stand by him; he raises his head and glances at you with a half surprised, half disappointed grimace on his battered face. "Ah, there you are," he remarks unimpressed as he lowers his tiny gray eyes on his glass once again. You calmly sit down on the small sofa across the table, opposite to where he has been seating for all eternity, too eager to steal a new whisper away from him to be bothered by his rough manners. The old man – you can't clearly see his face due to the poor light, but you suppose he is quite advanced in age by his raucous low voice – gestures vaguely to the bartender by half-raising his left hand, index and middle finger slightly extended, and the addressee reluctantly turns to the shelves behind him. You place your own hands on the sticky surface of the table, folding them together in a ball. Impatience is beginning to grow within the depths of your chest as a pool of boiling water: each popping bubble brings you one small step closer to loosing sanity.

Finally, with a quick, fluid motion of his hand and arm, perfected throughout the many years spent in bars, the man takes a swig from his glass; sighs – you detect the smell of beer in his breath from where you are sitting and suppress a wince – and thus utters: "I thought you would never come."


	2. Chapter 1: Legend

_Chapter I: The Legend_

You watch him swallow gulp after gulp of beer for what appears to you as an interminable amount of time. The bartender had brought you your unrequested pint of blonde beer some two minutes ago and you gently wrap your fingers around the cool glass. As small beads of condensation start to form along the smooth transparent surface, you silently wonder why the man has not spoken another word after his last statement. Hoping that he would not get too drunk and thus incoherently slur an incomplete story, you take the chance to observe the precious human being sitting in front of you.

He is old indeed; about sixty, you would guess. Strands of thin white, silvery hair escape the band of the wide-brimmed hat he is wearing and stand in sharp contrast with its black fabric. As your eyes adjust to the dim light of the bar, you start to make out the deep wrinkles that cross the pale skin of his forehead like black lines, converging in a darker frown mark in-between his brows; his eyes hold a particular but uncanny glint every time they meet your own — because after each swig, the man would put down his glass, examine you with his squinting eyes, then sigh, lower and shake his head as if he were suddenly very weary, and finally swallow the next mouthful of ale. You can tell that something is holding him back – that he is not happy with what he sees. When you voice your thoughts, the only response you receive is a sad grunt followed by half a chuckle; the man raises his hand to the bartender again and tiredly puts it back on the table. His hands, you notice, are quite beautiful and do not bear on them the ravages of time: the skin is pale, soft, just lightly crinkled at the knuckles, and the long fingers hold the same sinuous quality attributed to those of a weaver. How he could preserve his hands like that despite all is and will forever remain a mystery to you; however, the hope that he will weave a story for your eager senses to enjoy prompts you to keep your poise and wait for his words.

"This is not a story for kids." The sudden statement makes you startle just slightly as his low, raucous tone pulls you away from your reflections. He had spat the sentence as you would spit a bitter mouthful of food: neither contemptuously, nor necessarily disgusted, but rather disturbed and worried at the prospect that the taste – the effect your words will bring about – will stick to your tongue and to your entire being for way longer than you initially expected.

Though, of course, you are no kid. You know exactly what this conversation means; you understand how dire the consequences for treason and insubordination are, but nevertheless you persevere. The tug had become push, and the push had become a relentless pull that drew you to the next story similarly to how a magnet attracts opposite polarities to itself: uncaring of their contrasting natures, it impatiently sends out invisible threads to unite, rearrange, and tightly weave together the many scattered pieces into a solid whole. You are conscious that your addiction is as deadly as quicksand, that working against it will only make you sink deeper into its obsession. Yet, you know that, for how dry it might be, for how thirsty it might make you, it is all still worth those brief moments of bliss that satisfy your senses like cool rain on burning skin. Come what may — you will not give this up.

Potentially reading a determinate glint in your eyes as a signal to proceed regardless of anything that might have concerned him in the first place, the Weaver – so you choose to name him – finally sits back in his chair with a long sigh, leaving his glass, untouched, on the tabletop at last. You tense your back in anticipation; inadvertently, you lean forward on your forearms resting on the table's sticky wooden surface. He gazes out of the stained glass, looking at deformed shapes and glimmers of light passing by but seeing something that lay ages beyond them. The Weaver, you know, is catching the shifting shadows of his memory and intertwining them into a beautiful tapestry he will then hang up with words for only you to see — to feed upon. "There was once a legend — and probably there still is."

Ah. What a gorgeous start.

"This is a story with no happy ending, or maybe with no ending at all." The Weaver lets out a sad chortle as he shifts uncomfortably in his chair, turning his gray eyes on you. The long fingers of his perfect left hand loosely embrace the base of the glass, half-full with beer and sweating with condensation. The right hand opens up on top of the table like a fan, all five fingers fully extended. "But it sure does have a beginning. Of course, I know nothing about that, nor am I sure if I will ever want to know anything about it. What I do know, kid, is simply something that happened somewhere in-between, after the beginning and very close to the end." As it is impossible to determine the exact moment in which one falls asleep and starts dreaming, but rather simply realizes to be in the middle of their own fantasy halfway through, so do you begin to relax: the tension that had been building up in your stomach uncoils in a million tingles that warm every inch of your body, pulsating across its membranes as each word fits into the melody that had just begun to form in the back of your mind. Your shoulders sag; your back arches slightly up, and you rely even more upon the table's support to remain upright; your mouth waters and you swallow down your saliva with the same contentment a glass of aged red wine would have given you. The Weaver raises his free hand, forms a limp V with two fingers, proceeds with his story. You follow that alabaster hand's movements, utterly lost in and hypnotized by its gentle swaying— it is then that you passively realize that your life depends on this moment, on this man's hands, on his ability to weave a story for you to temporarily lose yourself into and subsequently host somewhere in your mind, where it will lie dormant until next time it stirs in its nest. But do you care? Your only chance to be honest with yourself slips away as you let the Weaver's rough voice lull you into the hot, overwhelming bliss only a clandestine passion could generate.

"She survived two Buster Calls, kid. Aye, I ain't lying. Two of them alright. You know how I know?" The hand folds into a loose fist and comes to rest down on the tabletop once again. "I know 'cause I was there. I was a soldier at the time, true, but I saw it all. Well, some of it, to be honest. This is one of the many reasons why she is said to be a legend.

"The call had come around midday on a very hot day in August. You must already know the amount of frenzy that the silver den-den mushi causes whenever it starts ringing." Both hands go up, and give a slight jolt sideways as he recounts in a bored tone a scene he might have seen too many times before. "First an instant of stunned silence, then chairs moving around, people running in and out of rooms, shouting, papers flying, feet stomping… The usual chaos. The transmitted code was – I still remember it clearly, and it will probably sound familiar to you as well – JA004D. And that brought a second, _un_usual, moment of silence. The room froze, just like that." Both hands opened up, exposing their palms, and rotated sideways in opposite directions as they came back down on the table in two lax fists. The index finger of the right hand stretched out and began tapping the wood in a regular rhythm. Tap, tap, tap, short pause. "Two admirals were called up; vice-admirals were given directions as to how reach the correct location in the New World; soldiers were scraped together and sent on warships." Tap, tap, tap, pause.

"Of course, I was among them. We reached the island in about ten hours at full speed. I remember the tension: it was so intense you could almost touch and catch it with your bare hands! Though, you could neither fight it or suppress it, because it would squirm and slip away from your grip like a fish. That is to say, no one could put their finger on what disturbed them so much. Naturally, we all knew – as you will know as well, if you remember your lessons at the MA – exactly what we were sailing toward, the caliber of the criminal we were seeking to apprehend on that day. Nobody had spoken a word, with the exception of some commands the captain had shouted at the helmsman. She already was a legend then, kid!" Tap, tap, tap, chuckle. "Once I heard from a friend who used to work in the intelligence department that they were researching old folk tales and fairytales because, apparently, she appeared in a couple or more of them! Picture that!" You had already lost your way in the meanders of your imagination, however. If you closed your eyes, you could see just beyond your eyelids the control room at the Marine HQ, with a rather large rectangular table placed right in its center. The wooden surface was entirely submerged by loose leaves of paper and stacks of folders which were the object of five marines' perusal. Another two were sat in front of a wall of machinery, picking up on radio transmissions and the like through the big black headphones they were wearing over their ears. One of them had just pushed his gear down around his neck, had stretched with a yawn – evidently tired by the morning he had passed sitting down, straining his ears to hear any sort of spoken message floating in the endless white noise like a piece of paper in a glass bottle – and was in the middle of proposing a short break and a shared lunch to all his colleagues when the bearded silver den-den mushi had woken up and had started ringing. You shared their eyes' itchy feeling – the result of long hours of continuous scrutiny of piles of files – the dull ache in their backs for having been bent over papers for too long, the slow realization and cold surprise that had slithered up their backs and wrapped around their chests as they watched the snail tremble and shake its antennae. And suddenly you were up on your feet with them, were running around the room to transmit a message; you entrusted a fellow marine with a task while you searched for a specific folder somewhere in one of the many stacks disseminated around the room, found it, cleared a space on the table with a wide sweep of your arm and dropped the file in front of you before hurriedly opening it and communicating its details to another unit via den-den mushi. You had been there, in this precise instant much later in time. "…But going back to our main story." Tap, tap, tap, pause.

"I was on the second Buster Call that was sent over to the island. When the man stationing in the crow's nest shouted the sighting – everyone went literally crazy. Some began to pray, others clung to their swords and to their guns like crybabies to their mothers' skirts. But most of us, myself included, ran up to the gunwales to watch." Tap, tap; the hand unfurled and rested on the tabletop fully open. As the Weaver goes on weaving his tale, you feel the wooden planks below your feet oscillate and move: the sea must have been rough on that day. Along with the smell of salt, you perceive the faint smell of gunpowder and burnt wood in the gust of wind that suddenly hits you. And then you see it in all its terrific majesty, right in front of the warship's prow: fire. Flames licking the water's edge in blind rage, tickling the heavens, breathing their pitch-black smoke into the air — their splendor altogether enhanced by the night sky. You find it beautiful, yet petrifying. The wind did not bring simply the smell of war, but also the sounds of carnage: in the distance you hear the screams, cries and shouts of the burned, the dead, the live, the burning. The admiral commanding the ship calls you all back to your posts, ready to reach port and engage in battle. You take your place next to one of the cannons along with another three soldiers. You are tense; all your muscles are strained, and your racing heartbeat pumps adrenaline faster and faster across your body; you can feel your brain taking in and processing information, ideas, thoughts at incredible speed. You happen to look up, and the sky is tainted by a deep vermillion — messy brushstrokes left by a painter angry at its creation, which swallow up even the stars' glimmer.

"We approached a rocky cliff jutting out towards the ocean." The Weaver paused; suddenly you land back on the hard chair of the nameless bar, hands clasping the wet glass of beer, feet steady on solid pavement. You shoot the man an angry glance, but the anger dissipates immediately as you find him staring blankly into the distance – his gray eyes lost in that fire, hypnotized by the flames. He is caught up in his own story, and you don't blame him for it. "She was right there, kid, right on the cliff's edge." He swallows and retracts his hands in his lap, disappearing below the table. "A legend 's supposed to be just a bunch of words put together by someone good enough to make it sound grand. They're not meant to be true, to appear before your very eyes in living flesh and bone. Yet, when they do… Over twenty years, and I still…" His voice trails off. You give him a moment to untangle the knot and weave the rest of the story. You feel the solemnity of that moment, the importance of this man's words, as a light pressure against your skin and as a weak headache. Your determination to piece back this legend into a story blooms in your chest yet again; spring explodes in you – you will succeed – in an exuberance of color and energy: you _will_ make the legend truth, should you even sell your soul to the Devil! And immediately you are unbelievably grateful to this old man sitting in front of you— a man willing to entrust to you a secret so big, so dangerous, so _gorgeous_ that it compares to wrenching a piece of his soul away and handing it to you on a bed of words plated in gold and chiseled in silver. So thankful are you that you feel the faint sting of tears at the corner of your eyes, but you hold them back.

The Weaver sighs, places his hands back on the table; he nervously glides his fingers along the wood's veining. "She was…" He follows his hands with his eyes, and so do you, as if he were writing out a spell of dark magic. "She was beautiful, kid. Oh was she stunning. Long hair shaken by the wind, so blonde it seemed pure gold. A huge sword in its black sheath was strapped behind her back. She was standing tall, surrounded by dead soldiers and in front of a dozen living ones— standing between cocked guns and crashing waves, she still kept her head high and her back straight." A warship is sinking on the starboard side of your own. You all grow silent as you pass by it to dock on the shore. Peering in the darkness, you notice that the ship had been _cut_ open into three clean sections. It slowly sinks in a sea of red water, it's surface littered by floating detritus, pieces of wood, and other, larger blots you interpret as corpses. You can't suppress a shiver as it trails down your spine and shakes your entire body against your will. As a narrow wooden bridge is lowered onto the compact sand of the island's now ragged beach the vice-admirals start hollering orders; you half-follow, half get pushed along by a small troop of armed marines, thus you do not get the time to reflect excessively on what you have seen. You start advancing with a light jog, in time with the rest of the squad, holding your rifle up and close to your chest and feeling the sheath of the sword hit your left side with each step. The air is dry, thick with smoke and dust; you find it extremely hard to breathe. Nevertheless, you push forward across the lush, burning vegetation, toward that cliff. What prompts you to put one foot in front of the other, what truly animates your being is not your sense of military duty or of justice. It is curiosity. It is a kind of disconcerting admiration.

"We ran up there as reinforcements, so quite a number of soldiers already engaged in the conflict blocked my view of her. I could only see little bits and pieces of her, no matter how much I moved around in the secondary lines. But I could _feel_ her. Her presence was overwhelming. She demanded attention; she required respect. She definitely was beyond human. Had to be, kid. Too many people on the ground, too much blood, too big an aura. When words become beings… Well, you can't expect them to be normal, like you and I are, can you? She was the one dominating the battlefield – not us." About twenty people were there, a whole island was going up in flames, yet that cliff was eerily silent. All guns had been cocked and trained. You cannot get a clear view of her despite all your fidgeting. A colleague elbows you in the side to make you stop moving. "Something had happened there before our arrival, though. The air was impossibly cold." The tension in the air is drawn as tight as a violin string – any disturbance, any vibration would make it snap. Employing all the stealth you are capable of, you attempt one last time at getting a better view of that living, breathing legend. But a tall man, raven-haired and clad in black, blocks your field of vision. Of him, you can only see his broad shoulders and straight back.

"And guess who was there, kid?" The Weaver places his right elbow and forearm on the table and leans in. You unconsciously mirror his movements; entranced you ask the obvious question. The Weaver holds his tongue for some seconds more— and finally whispers: " 'Hawkeyes' Mihawk, kid." The old man leans back in his chair, resuming his original slouching position. However, you do not imitate his movements; rather, you are petrified in that pose, frozen in that whisper. "Naturally, he was much younger compared to now. Still a youngster, aye, a troublesome upstart roaming the seas of the New World," he continues in a tone less hushed than a murmur but still lower than his natural voice. You still do not dare to move an inch. You realize that a casual movement will inevitably shatter your illusion; you are familiar with the cold grip that had taken hold of your guts that will turn into warm, velvety pleasure as you will begin to feel the pieces coming all together— the bliss of knowing what nobody else knew. You know that this was the most delicate moment of all: the moment in which words either harmonize with the choir you have assembled so far or screech dissonantly, ruining the story's melody. "And then, she spoke."

He sighs, the Weaver; a pale hand goes up to his battered face to rub it; you follow it with your eyes as it travels down his features and comes to rest on the table. "I don't know the sense of what she said. As I have mentioned, something had been going on before our arrival. She said—"

"—I will find it, the strength! I swear I will!" The legend shouts from the cliff's edge. You tense your back and freeze in place. Her voice is stunning. Clear as crystal. Strong as hate. Intimidating as a lion's roar. No one dares to shift a muscle. The dark-haired man does not flinch.

The Weaver interrupts his tale abruptly. You are flung back on the stuffed chair, in a stuffy bar at nighttime, breathing damp air that smelt of sweat and tasted of alcohol. Shock is quickly replaced by fury: you will not accept an incomplete tapestry, you shall not tolerate and unfinished work of art! Your mouth opens and your lungs fill up with warm air, ready to lash out at him and at his incompetence, but you notice the man's gray eyes darting warily around the room, and his hunched posture communicates to you his sudden circumspection. You let the anger dissipate once again, frown deeply, and decide to scan the room as well. You find it completely empty save for the two of you: no drunken sailors singing happily to a gay tune played on the piano, no waitresses twirling around the damp, sticky tables with trays full of pint glasses; only the bartender remains behind his counter, perpetually wiping an empty glass clean with a stained cloth – waiting for you to leave to close up shop. "We stayed here for too long, kid," the Weaver growl beneath his breath. You agree, but still you ask him to please, _please_, tell him what the legend did in the end. The Weaver gives you a disoriented look for the briefest of instants before answering: "Why, she flung herself off the damn cliff. Didn't have too many options, had she?" He stands up, scraping his chair's legs against the wooden planks. On cue, you do the same; you are ready to leave immediately: due to the anticipation for the story, you had not cared to take off your coat and scarf, but rather preferred to sit down and eagerly wait for "it" to begin. You thank the man and hurriedly begin to make your way out— you do not want anyone to overhear him: you wish to share nothing of that precious story with anyone; it is yours and yours alone to cherish and bask in its illicit existence. Last of all your worries: you must not be caught red-handed. The Weaver's raucous voice calls you to halt your steps and turn around to face the small table for the last time in the evening. "I want to tell you one last thing before you leave. She was broken."

You raise an eyebrow at that, and enquire about the nature of such brokenness. The Weaver simply shrugs. "I'd like to talk about that with you on our next meeting. Rumor is, she's still alive. I'll contact you."

And thus you part for the night. The trip back is over in an instant; you walk a brief reverie relishing the after-effects that follow the assimilation of a new rumor – next thing you are consciously aware of is the door to your room, locked shut before you, the abbreviation EC108 engraved on an iron plate barely visible in the corridor's darkness. Careful, careful, you open the door gently – don't make it creak – glide across the room's shadows and slip into your bed without making a sound loud enough to wake the other six dormant occupants. You pull the sheets up to your chin and stare for a couple of seconds at the lack, endless ceiling before closing your eyes. Sleep is merely a temporary break to allow the new story to find a safe spot in your mind, make it its nest, and thence hibernate until it next stirs and ruffles its feathers.

So you wait— wait for sunrise, for the hunt to resume.

* * *

><p><em>Dear Readers,<em>

_I apologize if this chapter is not as good as the prologue. Nevertheless, I thank you for your support and for stopping by to pay a visit. I hope you will stay on until the end, and will enjoy living the story as much as I do whilst writing (despite my incredibly slow updates). Please do not hesitate to leave a comment: you are the reason I keep writing, and I'd love to hear your voice. Thank you to all those that have dropped one already, and many thanks to those of you that have either put this story among your favorites or followed it._

_That said, I hope you have enjoyed your stay. I'll see you in the next chapter._

_- Cenerea_


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